Friday Y and I go to see Andy Warhol at the Dalles Hall. “Sure, come in, it’s on the first floor, but the boy at the cafeteria is out and he’s the one with the keys. But I can switch on the lights so you can get a glimpse.
” The woman puts on the lights and we stick our faces against the glass door. Both at the same time doesn’t work, since the glass reflects the light too strongly. I use my right eye. My left-eye sight is poorer. The woman watches to see what we make of it. I say “Yes”. Y says “Yes” too. Off we go. That’s how I saw Andy Warhol in Bucharest. By the way, Marilyn is a composition of 3 x 3 silkscreen squares. In Bucharest it was hung as a sequence of 9 squares.
Monday It’s the day after Sunday, so I draw up my ‘to do’ list for the day: a beauty of a list, I say. Off I go to have a bite. List too long. Phone rings. See, I’ve forgotten to add that onto the list.
Tuesday Berlin, September 8, opening of the Magic Blocks exhibition: two nice guys work on the installation, measuring tape, straightedge, and level always in hand. It only takes a sec to explain things, and they do their job to perfection, minutely, precisely, accurately. We’re in Berlin, aren’t we?
After the opening the streets are all ours. I like best the little Reconciliation church. It’s a clay building incorporating fragments and remains of the old church which stood right behind the wall and was demolished by GDR officials during the Cold War. Indeed it is but a small chapel, a perfect oval made of clay and protected by another oval structure in an open wood frame. Architects had initially opted for a concrete building, but the parish council stood firm in its opinion that it was too reminiscent of the wall proper and guided them to this extremely elegant solution.
This somehow connects to our own Magic Blocks, which needs to be conceived and developed as a participatory project. Architects still dream of the major, confident gestures of the ‘good old days’; however other people say that architects build buildings and have nothing whatsoever to do with the city. Increasingly more voices and forces speak against signature architecture, claiming the city and its architecture should be the result of an open and democratic public consultation process. The word “vision” is excluded here; simply mentioning it would make you look suspicious since many an architectural experiments proved themselves as mere polluting, non-functional mistakes. A subject worth perhaps further discussion.
Saturday Opening of the George Enescu music festival. I have to admit, of all the vocal genres opera and I are total strangers. Or at least to me Oedipus sounds excessively entangled and tiresome. Atonal solutions, disharmonies I know not who to blame for – the author or the orchestra – leave me totally in the blue. Moreover, the stage set-up is visually extremely static. I realize what is missing is the director’s vision; I’d like to see the Oedipus staged by Bob Wilson or Andrei Serban.
Wednesday Berlin: the Bauhaus exhibition is the broadest presentation in the world. Undoubtedly, Ikea is the direct heir of its thinking system in the realm of design. No small business, easily to be overlooked, if you asked me. A business dealing in civilization, that is one which takes into account design, politics, society. I’ll come back to this.
